Evaluation of Self-taught Learning-based Representations for Facial Emotion Recognition

This work describes different strategies to generate unsupervised representations obtained through the concept of self-taught learning for facial emotion recognition (FER). The idea is to create complementary representations promoting diver-sity by varying the autoencoders' initialization, architecture, and training data. SVM, Bagging, Random Forest, and a dynamic ensemble selection method are evaluated as final classification methods. Experimental results on JAFFE and Cohn-Kanade datasets using a leave-one-subject-out protocol show that FER methods based on the proposed diverse representations compare favorably against state-of-the-art approaches that also explore unsupervised feature learning.